50 years ago, we changed islands, moving from Long Island, New York to Oahu Island, Hawaii. To celebrate the anniversary of this transformative event, I’ll be posting some articles about our lives then. Here is the first on Fashions for Peace, my mother’s pageants to foster international understanding, including videos of her shows in Hawaii.
My mother, Lola Stone, was a life-long advocate of world peace and international understanding. She traveled with Long Island friends in 1958 to the border of the Soviet Union in a mission to end the cold war. She was a pen pal with a Russian woman for decades. We had international exchange students live with us, and we often visited UN Headquarters in New York City. She would frequently write letters to the editor of major newspapers, and once even spoke to Eleanor Roosevelt about women and world peace.
In the early 1960s, she conceived of Fashions for Peace, a pageant to foster cultural understanding through fashion, music, and dance. As a result of her requests to embassies, many countries donated national costumes. Some were exquisite, with golden embroidery and elaborate design. She then recruited models in the New York area to model clothes from their home countries.
Fashions for Peace pageants were performed at two Worlds Fairs: the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair in Flushing, Long Island and at Expo 1967 in Montreal. As a child, I helped with sound and lights. There were many other performances as well, many getting media coverage.
When we moved to Hawaii in 1969, my mother continued this initiative under the name Fashions Pacifica. I took super 8 movies of two of her pageants in Hawaii in the 1970s, which you can see by clicking below:
In 1997, when Lola and my father Robert B. Stone moved from Hawaii to Thailand, she donated the collection of global costumes to the University of Hawaii. In her writings, paintings, and international relationships however, she continued her passionate advocacy of peace, believing that humanity is one family.
Lola wrote in 2011 about the inspiration and history of Fashions for Peace in her post entitled “A Peacenik’s Protest.”
For more on the remarkable life of Lola Stone and her writings, art, and photos please visit thoughtsoflola.wordpress.com and get her ebooks here.